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← The Gambia Hall of Fame
Literature & Ideas Distinguished

Ebou Dibba

1943 – 2000

The Gambia's first widely read novelist

Distinguished is level 3 of 4 in the The Gambia Hall of Fame: sustained excellence over a career, widely honoured at home. See how the levels work.

Why they are here

His novel Chaff on the Wind, set in the Bathurst of the 1930s, was the first Gambian novel to reach a general readership, and remains the book that put ordinary Gambian lives into fiction.

Ebou Dibba was born in Bathurst, taught in Britain for much of his adult life, and wrote the novels that gave The Gambia a fiction of its own.

Chaff on the Wind, published in 1986 and set in the colonial capital in the 1930s, follows two young men off the river boats into the town, and was the first Gambian novel widely read at home and abroad. Fafa and Alhaji followed. He died in 2000; Gambian writers since have treated him as the point at which the country's literature began.
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